Egenera blades target data centers

MARLBOROUGH, MASS. - The goal at Egenera, an emerging blade server company, is to help big corporations - particularly well-known Wall Street firms - shrink their large, multiserver data centers so they can be managed less expensively and operate faster.

To do this, 3-year-old Egenera has developed its BladeFrame chassis, which is aimed at consolidating many Linux-based servers into one box and letting servers in the chassis be configured and partitioned on the fly through software. This technology is another move toward "virtualizing" a part of a company, such as storage. In this case, data center servers are created and managed in what Egenera calls a processor-area network.

The BladeFrame system can house up to 96 high-end (up to 2 GHz) Intel processors running Linux. These CPUs can be deployed as individual systems on two- and four-way processor blades. Server configurations, applications, storage and I/O are configured through a BladeFrame management console.

Processors in the BladeFrame are connected via a 2G bit/sec proprietary interconnect technology, which provides communication between the logical servers in a rack, and also allows for server load-balancing and failover. A 10/100M bit/sec or Gigabit Ethernet connection to a LAN, and Fibre Channel or SCSI connections to a SAN also are on the BladeFrame chassis.

The virtualized servers in the chassis are easier to manage, the company says, because server images can be set up and removed faster than dealing with physical hardware on individual machines.

"We use a blade form factor, but blades are really just a 1980s server form factor repackaged and a little more dense," says Deborah Miller, president and CEO of Egenera. Egenera delivers data center virtualization support today that HP, IBM and Sun plan to support in 2005 and 2006, she says.

Miller says Egenera's product differs from blade servers from vendors such as HP, Dell and IBM in that the BladeFrame processor blades are diskless - the systems work with most major SAN vendors' equipment - and that the I/O to the servers is controlled virtually through software.

"We put [Egenera] in the blade server market," says John Enck, a vice president at Gartner, "but the capabilities their product has are unique in the market . . . they have quite a bit of a lead on everybody."

Enck says the ability to manipulate storage and logical server identities among processors in the BladeFrame differs from competitive server blade products. However, all of Egenera's competitors have this ability planned for future products.

While Egenera's architecture differs from its competitors, it is going after a different market than current blade servers, which are aimed at consolidating many small servers running e-mail or other types of edge applications.

"The market we're attacking is the mission-critical, proprietary, Unix market," Egenera's Miller says.

So far, Egenera has been successful in usurping big Unix boxes at Wall Street firms. To break into this tough market, it didn't hurt that Egenera's founder and CTO, Vern Brownell, was once in the trenches of Wall Street IT as CTO of Goldman Sachs. Thus far, the company's announced customer lineup includes Goldman, Merrill Lynch and Credit Suisse First Boston (CSFB).